


Two Corpses

by AdelaCathcart



Category: The English Patient (1996), The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
Genre: F/M, Necrophilia, The Author Regrets Nothing, misery fic for the plague year
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-01-13
Packaged: 2021-03-18 04:27:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28737225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AdelaCathcart/pseuds/AdelaCathcart
Summary: This is the driest climate in the world, and we were well beyond the Valley of the Kings. In 1933 we found a fox at Wadi Sora. It was still asleep in 1935, and we could not understand why it never fled from us until we saw the pallor of its skin. Madox guessed it had lain there for decades. So she was not as different as you may imagine. I would have loved her at sixty, or at ninety. I loved her thus.
Relationships: Katharine Clifton/English Patient | Ladislaus de Almásy
Comments: 6
Kudos: 14





	Two Corpses

“I want you to ravish me,” she had said, when she was alive.

This is the driest climate in the world, and we were well beyond the Valley of the Kings. In 1933 we found a fox at Wadi Sora. It was still asleep in 1935, and we could not understand why it never fled from us until we saw the pallor of its skin. Madox guessed it had lain there for decades. So she was not as different as you may imagine. I would have loved her at sixty, or at ninety. I loved her thus.

The practice is not unknown in the Histories. Periander of Corinth, overcome by grief for the queen he had cherished and killed, baked his bread, so they say, in a cold oven. The wives of men of rank were once withheld from their embalmers until decay precluded their defilement, and this precaution was not mere jealous fancy, but occasioned by a common and well-documented perversion. No doubt I was in madness, but sane men too are known to have such desires. If some part of the spirit did not linger in the flesh those prohibitions would be unnecessary. We know by instinct that the dead stay near.

Firelight plays tricks, but I had put out the light. She would need it after I had gone. I saw her better in the dark. I knew too well those limbs, those lips, oases into which I had plunged. This cave was carved by flowing water, it had once been swum in. I am swimming in it now. Blood is pooled around her broken ribs; her side is blackened and swollen. I explore the swelling with my mouth that her sensation might be upon me, but there is pain in my ribs already, that strangely corporeal pain of rage and sorrow, grief which the body cannot contain. She felt it too.

When I touched her I was cautious as a schoolboy, fearful to hurt her, but her broken arms were fast around me and she did not cry out in pain but only sighed, as dry leaves sigh on stone. Anxiety had given her skin a sour taste along with the salt, and I craved this more than I have ever craved water. Her shrouds dissolved in my hands as I lifted them to kiss the soles of her feet, her stony knees, the cradle of her pelvis, every place where for protection I had painted her. The cochineal of her lips was now on mine. Sand in my mouth from her lion’s hair. An entropy. We were disappearing into the desert.

“We can never love each other again,” she had said, when she was alive.

She carried those words on her tongue for months, and he had dodged them like an acrobat. He saw them cloud her face and suddenly remembered an appointment; he dissolved them with the liquid solvents of his body so that when she finally tried to use them they were gone, dispersed into the air by the small breaths of her panting. He avoided her to weaken her resolve. A smile from her husband, whom she loved, would bring it back, devastate her. She might have died of Geoffrey’s trust but in the end Almásy’s jealousy worked faster.

It was impossible for her to leave him after completion of the act, she found, with his sweat slick on her skin, her claw marks red over his eye. The renewal of their entanglement. He was too near. At last she tried saying it before they’d even had the chance to undress, and that was no good either: they only fell upon each other all the more desperately, like survivors of a shipwreck, a friction-burn embrace, teeth upon teeth. Her nails on his scalp, her pronouncements expired. His body enveloping hers to shade it from the sun of shame.

He did not trust in his own words so he applied his tongue to more eloquent forms of persuasion. This was the softest of all his languages. It did no good. She had allowed him to believe that she could be convinced by his argument, when in fact all he could do was delay her.

As long as he did not agree, he thought, it would not be true. He would show her the inadequacy of speech. To lose her was incomprehensible, in the way that death is incomprehensible to the living. It was unreal to him until it was too late.

No breath came from that well-loved mouth. I guided her, as one guides the blind or the lame, for she could not move but that I moved us both. It might have been mistaken for reluctance, and yet all the time she called to me more loudly than ever she had in life, now she had been robbed of her language, and I, by her deafness, of mine. You must understand that I have given myself to the deserts, and the rasp of her cheek did not frighten me, nor did her cavernous chill. I had already acquired the habit of loving desolation, where a drop or two of water seems enough for a long lifetime, where you feel scorn at needing even that. And all the time an insidious thirst eats you alive.

The very last scraps of my life went into her. The last moisture she would ever know.

When we love we want everything of the beloved, and find even the tragedy of impossibility in that wish a joyous pain. There is always more, unknown, just out of sight on every horizon. Death draws down the sky like a lid. We both drowned under those painted swimmers. There was nothing more to discover after that.

She sundered us in Groppi Park, 28 September 1938, but I was with her once more several years later, and that time I no longer feared to lose her, for there was nothing more of her to lose. This time there would be no end, not even in our deaths. Two desert corpses.


End file.
